


Demon

by etorphine (orphan_account)



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: M/M, Vomiting, post-coital regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 08:50:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18495532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/etorphine
Summary: It was final now, like a torch scalding his skin, making him flush red like a choked child. He felt it when the cold air shimmied up his body and held him tighter than his mother ever did.





	Demon

**Author's Note:**

> from january 2015.

The sunset would have been sweet as honeydew as it rolled proudly through the window for anybody else, but there was pressure on Mello's chest, like a hapless bomb waiting to explode.  
  
He felt like he was sinking into the soiled mattress. No rate of survival. His eyes were still sticky with the kiss of slumber from the morning before as he reached for the gun beneath his pillow, but his chest only hollowed out more when he only knocked the hardwood floor.  
  
Regret--  
  
He felt it like a punch in the gut when he realized his heart wasn't stopping, but his breaths still came in mournful pants. He couldn't move, but he traced the pressure back to a pale arm strung lowly across his shoulders, short, light hairs dancing in the sun like stocks of grain. God, the microscopic view of skin disgusted him. He pushed away the offending arm and leapt up on his elbows, chancing to turn away from the window, away from the opened shutter blinds.  
  
Matt slept beneath him, his back to the ceiling, his nose buried deep within a raggedy pillow. He looked like he was dead, and Mello wished he were, if only not to deal with his breaths or his questions. If he could end it cleanly right there, he'd take the gun and splatter the musty sheets with the scent of his own brain.  
  
Regret...  
  
He ran a hand through his hair and it tugged at the threads of his skin. One by one, his hair tore out into his palms like string. He was unravelling, bit by bit; Matt had mostly taken out all the stitches. And it fucking hurt to watch him sleep there with his dusty skin, his ashy complexion, his grimy eyelashes catching the sun, glowing in the darkening room as the windows made lopsided squares all over the sheets.  
  
-  
  
It became cold.  
  
Regret. It tasted sweet, bitter, noxious and poisonous; it rested on the tip of his tongue as the worst decision, then settled in the pit of his stomach with a rock that weighed him down under.  
  
Mello hadn't moved, Matt's slung arm twisting around his waist in ropey vines, like he had any right to touch part of his scarred skin. They were burning like the first day, all tingly and electric, when Matt grumbled in his sleep at a man who wasn't there.  
  
He stayed on the mattress to watch the squares slide into lines and then into cool blue patchworks. Now the room was dark and the air was cold, because the air conditioning never worked in the good-for-nothing apartment anyway. It was all for show, that sunset. A mockery of the romance that never really awaited him with these too-thin sheets tossed callously across his shins and his hands tickling to choke the body next to him.  
  
He tossed Matt's arm back onto the mattress and shifted onto the cold hardwood. It sent pinpricks up his legs like a cheap kick. He began to pace, from the door and back, walking the plank and getting off, getting back on.  
  
Regret.  
  
It was final now, like a torch scalding his skin, making him flush red like a choked child. He felt it when the cold air shimmied up his body and held him tighter than his mother ever did. Oh yeah, the Regret was eating him alive, and it was fresher and louder than ever now that he could see the dead pieces of leather that lay on the bedside table, the striped, nicotine-soaked cotton drowning precariously underneath the swathes of the bed.  
  
Oh, it hit, it hit hard--  
  
The bottle of vodka lingered in the back of his throat and hammered away at the back of his skull. Matt... what did he--? Oh, right--with the tongue, and he--oh--  
  
Oh, the knots in his joints snapped into clarity. He'd been pushing against the floor like a kitten trying to beg for affection; he hadn't bothered with the mattress until the air in the room got too sick. And the threads of his hair falling out onto the floor like he was paper doll was the manifestation of too many hands against his skull, tearing his scalp as Matt--with those hands?--grabbed him like he was full of hollow weight.  
  
Fights, fucks, God, God; he needed to get out of there.  
  
He recognized it when he felt his feet sinking into the ground. Quicksand. Then his fingertips felt weak, like his wires weren't connected anymore, and his body had lost connection with its host. Then came--and God, did he hate it--the way his lungs felt like they were being squeezed by ghost hands. Wrangled and twisted, pumped with minute vigour, draining him of air as he began to gasp... and gasp... and gasp.  
  
He was fuzzy, static in his ear. The onslaught of the grey noise flooded into his brain and suddenly he couldn't see what was in front of him. Oh God, he hated it--he hated when it happened. When Matt would wake up to the sound of his knees hitting the floor, his head hitting the toilet seat, his nails clawing at the door to keep quiet.  
  
Right, that was when the Regret took over.  
  
Into the toilet It went.  
  
-  
  
"Mello... are you--?"  
  
He was up. The little bastard was up, rubbing his eyes like a petulant child at midnight, staring at him wondrously, and half-naked with no shame. He was rounding the door with young curiosity, and it made Mello heave a new one.  
  
"Oh, fuck."  
  
Gravelly with sleep, like a good lullaby. Mello didn't have much in his stomach but it was all tangy vodka and sick, sweet globs of undigested chocolate. His throat burned like the grating of his knees against asphalt, and the acid made his nose sting. He wasn't going to fucking  _cry_ , Goddamnit--he wasn't--  
  
That fucking hand on his back.  
  
"Stop! Stop," he stuttered, mouth full of water. "Don't touch me."  
  
It made his skin crawl like it was alive, bubbling and oozing and popping like the sound of a good sewage drain.  
  
"I'll go get some water," Matt mumbled, rushed. The words came out of his mouth like a long string of expletives, so nasty to hear. "Sorry."  
  
He couldn't help but sob as he coughed into the toilet bowl, dripping acid and saliva onto the porcelain mangled all with the salty debris of his tears. He choked back a noise, and another, and another. He hoped Matt couldn't hear him cursing him over and over again.  
  
-  
  
"If it made you feel like that..."  
  
The water was sitting beside the grimy bath tub, dark hair stains circling it like it'd been growing there with the mould. Mello felt his hair lifted back off the sweaty nape of his neck, and it felt like he was being torn into shreds again and he dry heaved and began to tear again with a desperate gasp.  
  
"Make it stop. Make it stop."  
  
Regret... about what?  
  
"I can't. You know I can't."  
  
About thin, frail hands with monstrous capabilities, thick like trees to wrap around his broken ribs.  
  
About cold bodies, warm bodies, and the taste of his gritty flesh, up-close with a compost heap, and wanting more of it.  
  
About the boy that resided in the bones that Matt couldn't fill just yet, all angles and awkward conjectures. The soft skin that turned pink in the snow--Regret for his tiny, warm palms, now pressed against his shoulders, trying to stop him from shaking.  
  
"Was it me?"  
  
What could he say?  
  
"I didn't..."  
  
That he was afraid of wanting him?  
  
"We won't again."  
  
That he wanted to taste him, ash and sweat and tequila and all?  
  
"It was a drunken mistake, man. You know..."  
  
That he couldn't get the sound of him moaning out of his mind like a repeat track, glitched into his system? Over and over and over and over--  
  
"... you know I'd never take advantage of you."  
  
That he couldn't fucking believe the honesty on this boy. He wore it like a suit, and it looked like shit on him. He didn't fill it in well, like it was his Daddy's before and now he'd thought he should start to grow up. It made Mello sick, no, because what the fuck was wrong with this boy? What had gone wrong? What had gone right?  
  
"... Matt."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Get the fuck away from me."  
  
One hesitant withdrawal, an intake of breath, and two footsteps later, he was alone again, a date with the toilet bowl.  
  
It didn't feel like he had enough air to breathe.  
  
-  
  
The shakes subsided.  
  
Porcelain made him feel a bit less homesick.  
  
He could smell cigarette smoke looming in through the closed bathroom door, like the snake tempting him to take a bite, just another bite.  
  
-  
  
"You're... good now?"  
  
The air was stunted with the spark of unfamiliarity and the bad stench of sickness. A swig of a Listerine wouldn't help with much. Mello's hair still stuck to his skin like it'd been painted on, and he wasn't wearing a shirt, his ugly fat knife wounds and the mountainous terrain he called a burn all draining his energy and living on without him.  
  
"Mm."  
  
Matt wasn't looking at him, but the mug was half-full. He'd taken the courtesy to put on some clothes while he was away, and he'd chosen black, because he knew the stripes worsened his vertigo. Little things over the years, like how there was a chilled glass of chocolate milk on the fold-up, just waiting.  
  
Everything was puke-orange, sky tinted sepia with the snow. Matt's breaths came out in dragon puffs even without a trace of nicotine. But the smell hung in the air regardless--familiar like the scent of his skin, the raw red mark on his neck like an ugly rash. Reminding Mello of how much he loved the smoke dancing in his mouth if he weren't so fucking afraid of suffocating.  
  
Regret... was mostly fleeting.  
  
"I'm sorry." Matt raked a hand through his hair. "I really am."  
  
"I know."  
  
"You do?" His voice sounded relieved, and Mello cursed him again for his cloak of honesty when he could have just easily told him to give him a real answer. "I didn't mean to give you a panic attack. About last night."  
  
"Neither you nor I can control them."  
  
"I know, but it happened because of what we did, right?"  
  
Matt glanced at him haphazardly, apologetically, the cigarette still lit cherry red by his lips. So chapped and red and bitten and ugly, and terrible to taste.  
  
He loved the taste.  
  
Mello didn't want to knock over his reservations, so hastily and poorly set, wobbling underneath his poor resolve. He felt the same warmth inching into his face again when he looked at Matt, now that all the bile was gone from the crevices of his mouth and only dangled limply from the bathroom, leftover only with the incredulity when he watched the smoke hide his eyes.  
  
Matt was... terrifying. The vomit orange was washing his skin into a steady mustard darkness. He was nothing but a mess of ill colours and tantalizing shapes. The shadows dipped against the hollows of his cheeks and made deep ponds in his clavicles. He was...  
  
Emerald, sea green, washed-up grains of sand decorating the skin splashed over the bridge of his nose. Salmon lips, salty with the water, trembling tree-vine veins, collapsed and marked with age and disuse.  
  
He was fear, kissing deeply with longing, fucking in the face of sanity, and it drove Mello terrible. He was gingery copper in the thin tuffs of his hair falling gently over cheap plastic motorcycle goggles, hard backs, ribs like xylophones, and such a warm voice that took him to the wooden mahogany of the twin-sized bed, coated with luxury cotton.  
  
Mello took the cigarette from between Matt's limp fingers, staring down at him from hardly much vantage--but Matt was slouched and shrinking. Mello preferred Djarums, cherry and sweet and coiling, and not Reds but...  
  
"Matt?"  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"Stop talking."  
  
The taste of smoke was evil on his lips, but it was better, much better, much less evil, than the boy himself.


End file.
